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An anonymous reader writes "There's still the alphabet soup and corporate conflicts regarding cell phone standards in the U.S. but... there might be some hope for a single-chip GSM phone, which might open up some interesting possibilities."

I am Sure That I am not the only person who would love to see an integrated cpu/memory/GPU/etc on one chip

Why would you want a pc that you couldn't upgrade the memory or video on? Or end up paying to disable what you paid for originally? What you mention would be fine for your home pc drone or specialized use (PVR comes to mind), but as a chip for the cognoscenti, I can't see it flying.

That's a slightly (actually its a rather large) difference in scale and technologies you're talking about. And how would one upgrade the individual components?
It might be useful for handhelds and thin webpads though - still its rather limiting in that regard which will likely cause any experiments in this direction to remove themselves from the marketplace.

Now integration of common features which don't require upgrading (Firewire, USB1/USB2, Ethernet, 6 channel sound) is interesting and worthwhile, which is why the new southbridges all do some or all of this.

IMHO, I wouldn't want to see that unless it was on the very low end of the computer market. I like my parts compartmentalized. If my video card goes out, I don't have to get a new cpu/gpu/ram at what is likely to be an increased cost. It is worth noting thought that you can currently purchase many motherboards that have a soundcard and video card (that leeches of your memory) built in. I have had bad experiances with such combined units (bad stability, performance). If it is done right, they could change my mind, but it would have to be a quallity piece of hardware that performs well and is either cheap enough to buy a new one when I want to upgrade, then I might consider it.

A passive component is one that does not require power- something like a resistor or a capacitor. It is particularly difficult to make decent-size capacitors on a computer chip, thus almost any system will have at least a handful of external passive compontents. But that's okay, since they are usually quite small (a few millimeters square).

Price is the big winner for manufacturers. Having a single chip solution would quickly drive the price of the phones (and other techno toys) down and facilitate the widespread move to GSM.

I assume that by "interesting possibilities" he is referring to possibly being able to imbed the chip into other types of devices cheaply (I'm thinking of having a chip in each piece of furniture that you have to assemble so it'll phone home to let the manufacturer know how big of a klutz you are and how many screws are left over).

I didn't ask about "interesting possibilities". I just asked whether it would be "functionally different". It didn't seem like it would.

As for having my furniture rat me out for not putting it together strictly following their cryptic instructions, I'm not ready to volunteer for that as of yet. And just imagine the airwaves pollution if all these new devices were phoning willy-nilly.

The "passives" refer to components that do not have to draw current - capacitors, resistors, filters, duplexers, etc. In particular, there are a variety of passives required to condition the RF transmit and receive paths.

Keep in mind that though lower energy consumption in itself is not functionally different, it paves the way for integrating other components (bigger screen, camera, GPS, Bluetooth, etc...).

I have a SonyEricsson T68 (not a t68i, but it would be if I got the firmware upgrade). My phone is tri-band GSM, which means it will work no matter what country I'm in so long as they have a GSM phone network.

However, the t68 (which is probably the nicest phone I've seen to date) is not exactly cheap.

Now whether *this* chop is tri-band is another question, but I'd be very surprised if it wasn't.

I do. cdmaOne doesn't provide basic functionality such as personal mobility (the ability to seperate your account information from the hardware you're using at the moment), a global number space, ISDN connectivity, and system-implemented network features, and the security is tough enough for my purposes - a casual snooper is going to have problems locating and fixing on a single conversation, a more highly placed snooper is likely to have access to the underlying network anyway.

UTMS, the next generation of GSM, includes all of the above features and provides a variety of air-interface technologies including CDMA, so the capacity issue isn't going to last very long. As far as I see, cdma2000 still lacks the above basic features, which I find absolutely increadible especially as GSM networks have been around now for much longer than IS-95 based stuff.

I was very relieved when AT&T started providing GSM in my area, after living here four years with only IS136 (D-AMPS/TDMA), cdmaOne, and NexTel networks available. Having used both IS136 and cdmaOne networks, I felt I was giving up a huge amount to use them, and coming back to GSM has been a joy. Just being able to have a PDA phone again (not really a great idea on a non-GSM network - if you can't leave your PDA at home without losing your connectivity, who wants such a thing?) has been fantastic.

Lack of personal mobility is a deployment issue, not something intrinsic to CDMA. The network operators don't want you to have the same number when you switch carriers... basically to increase the hassle of switching.

In the US, the cost of the phone is subsidized by the carrier. On the day you sign up for service with Verizon (for e.g.), Verizon spends about 100-300 dollars on you. The Motorola phone that costs 29.95 at Radio Shack probably costs $300.00 if you buy it yourself. That is why the cell-phone business model involves the lock-in period. You can blame the business model if you wish, but the fact remains that cell phones would be far less popular in this country if the user was expected to buy the phone.

As for the upgrade schedule of GSM... the next step is Wideband CDMA, which works over 5 MHz spectrum. Don't hold your breath waiting for it to arrive... the equipment is at least 2-4 years away from general availablility.

Meantime, the US version of CDMA (CDMA2000) is marching ahead. The voice part is well-entrenched. The 3G version (which works over 1.25 MHz, enabling carriers to use their existing spectrum as opposed to having to aqcquire new, continuous chunks of 5Mhz spectrum) is available today, you can buy service from Sprint and Verizon. Nortel, Lucent, Motorola and Samsung have mature Base Station implementations.

The data part of CDMA2000, 1xEVDO, will be available early next year in commercial versions. Nortel, Lucent and Samsung are trialing their implementations with different carriers as you read this. 1xEVDO provides a 2.4Mbps shared pipe over 1.25Mhz spectrum and kicks the ass of UMTS and Wideband CDMA. UMTS offers only a few hundred kilobits per second, and Wideband CDMA offers a max of 2Mbps over a 5 Mhz spectrum.

The rest of the World has already made up its mind as to what it prefers. Most carriers in North America and Asia (in particular, Korea) have decided to go with CDMA2000 as opposed to Wideband CDMA.

In short, Europe is not going to be ahead in wireless for much longer.

Lack of personal mobility is a deployment issue, not something intrinsic to CDMA. The network operators don't want you to have the same number when you switch carriers... basically to increase the hassle of switching

Nope, that's not true. cdmaOne cannot allow a user to switch their account from hardware to hardware without the direct intervention from the operator. Period. It's a limitation of the technology.

A GSM user can use the same account with as many phones as they wish, switching from one to another in the time it takes to remove the SIM from one phone and slot it in another. That's why most smartphones are GSM - because, frankly, anyone using a smartphone on a cdmaOne network (or, god forbid, a D-AMPS one) will find they're stuck with having to use that phone for all their usage associated with that number. Not many people in their right minds would do such things, and hence not many cdmaOne users have smartphones.

As for the rest of your comments, UMTS is a multiple air-interface system, one of whose technologies is WCDMA. If Qualcomm doesn't actively push WCDMA, and currently it's trying to diss it, it'll find it's without patent revenue from the vast majority of operators worldwide, because UTMS operators will simply use EDGE or other interfaces. cdma2000, in the meantime, badly needs basic additional functionality, such as personal mobility, if equipment providers and network operators are to recoup anything substantially above what they get from existing voice networks. Data networks are no-go without personal mobility. It's time Qualcomm woke up and realised that.

A GSM user can use the same account with as many phones as they wish, switching from one to another in the time it takes to remove the SIM from one phone and slot it in another. That's why most smartphones are GSM - because, frankly, anyone using a smartphone on a cdmaOne network (or, god forbid, a D-AMPS one) will find they're stuck with having to use that phone for all their usage associated with that number.

Actually CDMAOne does have the capability. Its just not used in North America. But it is manditory for all CDMAOne phones in China to have the account information stored on the R-UIM card. The R-UIM card is almost exactly the same as the GSM SIM card. The only difference is the name and the CDMA specific file structure. I have R-UIM cards with both the GSM and CDMA file structure on them, so they can be used in GSM and CDMA phones.

This is mainly a provider issue and not a lacking of the CDMAOne or IS-2000 standard. If you want look at http://www.3gpp2.com/Public_html/specs/CS0023-0.pd fFor the relivant standards on the R-UIM card, you'll see that for the most part it points at the GSM standards for how to use the card.

www.3gpp2.com is a good site to look at the standards for IS-2000 and what features are there. I don't know of any of the features you've listed that aren't already in the standards, its just that the providers aren't using them.

I've used cdmaOne phones from Nokia, Qualcomm, and Samsung. I don't recall any of them having an unused SIM slot in them. I also recall mentioning this limitation on the alt.cellular newsgroups and being rubbished for my troubles by a Qualcomm employee who announced that cdmaOne will never support personal mobility because of the desire to have reverse compatability with AMPS networks and use the ESNs to identify phones.

The features you're describing may be part of cdma2000, I don't know. I certainly hope so. But cdmaOne, the name given to the existing 2G standard whether over cellular (IS-95) or PCS bands it definitely doesn't apply to. China may be using some CDMA based standard loosely related to IS-95, but it isn't cdmaOne if it has SIMs. I'm a tad surprised, I recall China playing a long dance with Qualcomm and then rejecting their technology. I assume the modifications were necessary to have them reconsider.

I can live in hope. If cdma2000 supports and requires implementation of these features, then it'll be on a par with UMTS and be worth looking at. If it makes all of these features optional, then the existing cdmaOne operators, who have generally been more interested in compatability with AMPS and fractionally higher capacity than providing customers with decent features, are likely to screw it up enough for other operators to decide to avoid it for an apparently limited feature set.

If cdma2000 has made it optional incidentally, then they're destroying a second major feature incidentally: roaming.

Ultimately I'm interested in the features. I must have personal mobility. I'm not keen on buying hardware for one "standard" and finding that the majority of operators on that standard will refuse to allow me access to their network with it. But I guess with ATT, Cingular, and Voicestream all on GSM or migrating to it, and all likely to adopt UMTS, at least I have a guarantee that even in the US I'll still have that choice.

UMTS is the next generation GSM standard. It offers a choice between multiple air interface technologies. UMTS is NOT the cdmaOne standard. It includes a CDMA based air interface standard, but this is as related to cdmaOne as an airplane is related to a balloon. Standards and protocols matter.

GSM offers one air interface technology, TDMA. It is not, however, the IS-136/D-AMPS standard, the so-called "TDMA" standard of the USA. GSM is about as related to IS-136/D-AMPS/"TDMA" as an airplane is to a balloon. Standards and protocols matter.

UMTS, and GSM, offer personal mobility, a global number space, ISDN connectivity, and system level network features. cdmaOne, the so-called "CDMA" standard, or IS-95, does not. Period. It sucks. Neither, from what I recall, does cdma2000.

Travelling for business GSM is a big advantage. It is available in practically every county in the world and with a tri-band phone the world is my Oyster. To see the sort of coverage GSM has, pop over to GSM World [gsmworld.com].

GSM is an evoloving standard which incorporates all sort of sorts of technologies. Encryption could be added, but like any standard involving multiple parties, it will take time. There will always be pluses and minuses, though I like what GSM has to offer.

According to this [gsmworld.com] GSM World article, security is not much of a problem any more. "A new security algorithm, known as A5/3, will provide users of GSM mobile phones with an even higher level of protection against eavesdropping than they have already. It will ensure that even if a prospective attacker manages to pull a GSM phone call out of the radio waves, he will be completely unable to make sense of it, even if he throws massive computing resources at the task.

Who wants GSM?
It's so weakly encrypted, anyone with a cheap pentium can crack it real-time.

While GSM isn't state of the art (it's 20 years old), I've not come across a way of breaking it in real time, and I've only come across a theoretical attack with recorded information which would be quite difficult to perform in practice. Can you provide a reference?

I suspect you are thinking of cracking the SIMs (the smartcard used to give a mobile its phone number) - if you have physical possession of the SIM you can clone it quite quickly - but only for those GSM companies daft enough to use an implementation of the A3/A8 algorithms which was only intended for demonstration use. (A3 and A8 are placeholders - it's up to the operator to select which algorithms will be used to implement them).

Companies in England & France have problems with industrial espionage -- people sit on each side of the channel with parabolic dishes and listen in on other companies' cell calls.

Again, can you substantiate that? I find it very difficult to believe, partly on technical grounds, and because even if the signals were in the clear, this would be very unproductive as compared with hacking the wetware.

I, too, was excited about GSM. I even went so far as too attempt to purchase a GSM Phone/PDA. Then I realized exactly how slowly and sparsely this was being rolled out across my service area. Looks like I will be stuck with TDMA for a while.

The same problems seem to exist with cell phone technologies and broadband distribution. Yes GSM exists. Yes broadband exists. But when can EVERYONE get it EVERYWHERE? I am beginning to think NEVER!

...I even went so far as too [sic (nice callback, eh?)] purchase a GSM Phone/PDA

I went so far as to actually purchase one. Damn thing sucked. Of course, YMMV, but I had a Handspring Visor with that Springboard phone on it with Voicestream service. It looked like it'd be really neat to have all the functionality of a PDA with the functionality of a phone.

Had the following problems with it...

Damn near impossible to dial, and no voice dial support. Trying to call someone while driving is a recipe for disaster.

Battery had a shorter lifetime than the average MTV band

Screen didn't light up on an incoming call making answering phone calls in the dark while driving a worse experience than most/.ers trying to perform a drunken no-look, one-handed bra removal

GSM, CDMA, TDMA,... There are many standards. I'm not much of a radio engineer, but I'll bet I could come up with a different one that would work in a few days. (It would suck compared to the ones we have now) Who cares though, the point is the standard, the point is the phone works. I've used GSM, CDMA, and a couple other standards IT DIDN'T MATTER! Thats right, all the standards work. You the consumer does not need to care.

Watch service areas. Look for features that you will use. Engineers could build a phone with all standards built in, if they wanted to. (tri-band GSM is common, as is dual band analog/digital) It turns out though, most places in the US that you travel either has coverage in all standards, or no coverage in any.

I don't get why people care which standard their phone uses. That is something for the phone companies to worry about.

All you have to do is live in one of the other 199 countries of the world. Us non-Americans have been used for years to carrying our GSM phones around the world with us and making phone calls wherever we are (except, of course, in the USA).

Does anyone know why the USA insists on being different to the rest of humanity?? - it's not just phones, it's also the only country with its own paper sizes, it's the only country still using slugs and foot-poundals, and so on...

But you can squese a GPRS only (no voice) network into the very small frequency bands available in the USA. Can't do GSM voice as teh inter cell interference is too high, but you can just about manage it with Coding Scheme 1 in GPRS. Your throughput will only be around 9kbps, but if you want faster write to the FCC and ask for more spectrum.

GPRS is not exactly high-speed. Theoretically it's up to 115kbps but in
practice it's no better than POTS modem. GPRS is a packet-based protocol
on top of GSM and means a much more economical usage of bandwidth
(compared to GSM data and POTS modem, which use the entire band regardless
of actual data transmission).

GSM is analog switched technology... GPRS is packet based. Lets see... which one do we want? Since GSM never really took off in the US, why not work on getting GPRS standard accepted in the US

GPRS is a packet-based extension to GSM, using spare timeslots (well, you can have dedicated timeslots, but you get the idea). You can't have GPRS without GSM. It's good for data access, but it's not intended for voice.

In theory you could use VoIP, but it would be an expensive way of doing the job worse than GSM (e.g. you'd lose echo cancellation). Also most networks don't yet allocate dedicated bandwidth to it, so while I've used it for streaming video, I've had to put up with the odd jerky patch.

BTW, someone else seemed to think GPRS was high-speed circuit-switched - that's HSCSD, basically GSM with some of the error correction turned down, and with potentially more than one time slot allocated.

and suffers from insane 'big brother' cell tower syndrom (or whatever you wanna call it when the phone is constantly telling the tower where it is, and what it's doing).

GSM doesn't do that. Simplifying a bit: a handset only communicated with the network when it's switched on, or when it moves between large areas (containing hundreds of base stations), or after a timeout of a few hours. The network needs to know roughly where it is to start incoming calls, but then it broadcasts a "wake-up" call from all of the base stations in the area. When that happens, the phone contacts a base station to pick up the call, and at that point the network knows exactly where it is.

Aargh... Why are you being so difficult? Most western countries have agreed to adapt GPRS as a temporary standard before a UMTS-net is up and running. You are moving towards isolation regarding mobile technology, that isn't good. Not for you and not for the other 95.5% of the world population. (world PopClock [census.gov] and cia factbook [odci.gov])

For the same reason Sony created the memory stick instead of using CF or Smart Media as their primary choice.

It's all about who can patent the next big technology first and make billions off of it. It's not about compatibility with big companies (I realize Sony is based ultimately in Japan) it's about profits.

And I don't want to sound rude, but DUH! It's only brought up on/. that America is just a flawed business now. Why even ask. No one that runs these companies reads this (If a head honcho from MS or Sony or somethin' is readin' this, I'm logged in under a friends user name)

I'm an American and I'm the first to admit that plenty of times Americans forget about or just don't care about the rest of the world (our leader worse than most). This is not the case for cell phones. Most people don't need a cell phone that works on multiple continents. If different standards are adopted in different countries, I don't think it's a big deal. We have different voltages and socket design, different TV standards and drive on different sides of the road, but things still work pretty well. If we've resisted the vastly superior metric system for about 200 years, we can probably hold out on GPRS. I would bet a dollar that we all end up with UMTS before too long.

can you name me one advantage the yards/miles/gallons/etc system has over the metric system?

Umm, zero cost of conversion?

Nobody's arguing that metric is superior. It's not the USA being arrogant, it's the USA listening to all of the businesses that whine whenever the topic of conversion is brought up. The USA very much caters to its corporations, even when it isn't in anyone else's best interests or even logical.

In the US government many (most? all?) contracts and the like are required to be performed in metric. Some businesses work in metric. While total conversion to metric is more costly than the short-term costs involved in converting on-the-fly, don't bet that it's going to happen any time soon.

If you look at the history of telephony in the US you can understand why it has evolved the way it has compared to Europe.

First of all, land lines are significantly cheaper in the US than in Europe. And the phone companies are required to bring a line to your MPOE. There are places that people live in europe where you still can't get a land line, even in 2002. We did the hard work for the last mile problem and some places in Europe haven't. And the high cost of landlines increased demand for the cheaper mobile services.

Secondly, analog cell service had good coverage in the US when the first digital technologies came out. Maybe if the folks who had designed GSM had thought about how the US was gonna roll it out then they would have realized that the ability to fall back to analog would help the rollout. The folks at Qualcomm got it, as did the inventors of TDMA.

The US is much less dense than europe in terms of cell users. Therefore building out a brand new network is expensive and the lack of density means that it's hard to recoup the cost of the towers in remote places. That makes it hard to roll out a technology that's backwards compatable.

Don't get me wrong, I like GSM. I have a GSM phone. And I wish it was better rolled out here. Although I like the tech, I will be the first to admit that my TDMA phone gets much better coverage. I don't think that the existence of other formats is an attempt at American isolationism but rather a combination of the nature of America (a lot of sparse areas), the shortsightedness of GSM not offering the ability to speak analog, and the cost of upgrading vs. the need to make money.

And by the way, if you're gonna bag on the US for not using GSM then don't forget that Japan, one of the worlds densest cell markets, doesn't use GSM either.

The main reason the USA is behind in cellular is that in the USA the cellphone numbers have been intermixed with the normal land-based ones, and therefore the operators could NOT charge the person initiating a call to a cellphone any more than to any other number, because the caller had no way to know he was calling a cellphone. In Europe, they made separate area codes for cellphones from day dot, so they could charge the caller, and so half the costs of the cellphone user are paid by people calling her, and so the bill is only half - for the outgoing calls.

The whole thing with density is nonsense, Finland is far less dense than the USA, and is the leading cellular phone country. If there is a density issue at all, then it is urban density, and the USA is not short on that. To have a successful cellular service you do NOT need to serve every corver of Utah or Alaska, or northern lapland for that matter.

and landlines did go to pretty much everywhere electricity went, lack of landlines had pretty much no impact on the adaptation of cellular phones. the cheapness and the 'fairness' of the system however did(you know pretty much how much you'll be paying and don't pay for receiving magazine sellers calls, and the system is cheap enough for parents to buy phones for their kids too and still feed them).

also, you can't carry a landline around the town, and pagers are just plain silly compared to having a phone of the same size).

Well, after telling its wireless customers for the past few weeks that it will be the first to offer GSM on the east coast of the US, ATT Wireless finally did it.

Hmm. First of all not only was ATT not the first to use this technology on the east coast [Voicestream, Verizon, and even Nextel have been using it for quite some time now], but they are also trying to get people to pay $40 a month to use it...

First, I'm a fan of GSM since it is an open standard made by the ETSI guys. Go to http://www.etsi.org get an account and download the standards. I'm curious about your statement on saying IDEN is more secure than GSM or CDMA. IDEN is Radio and TDMA combined, and propietary. GSM & TDMA are not more secure than CDMA, as CDMA is base on code access using orthogonal functions. GSM and TDMA are somewhat similar in that they both provide multiple access to one channel through multiple time slots, hence being less secure. The cool thing about GSM (me favorite) and CDMA from a service provider is they actually have an upgrade path to 3G, TDMA does not or at least it won't be supported. GSM (circuit switched) goes to GPRS (packet switched) then to your choice of EDGE or WCDMA. Sim cards will be supported through the entire path. For the CDMA guys CDMA to CDMA 1X to CDMA2000, Qualcom earns royalties off this technology(me least favorite). From the service providers view it is cost effecient if they choose CDMA or GSM and stick with the upgrade path. Cingular & AT&T find themselves switching from TDMA to GSM, because no one is really providing an upgrade path for TDMA, although a standard was written for TDMA based 3G, no one will support it. By the way, Verizon is a CDMA based network and over 80% of the world uses GSM. IDEN who?

Now, here are some essential bits for you. GSM is a second-generation, all-digital mobile-phone standard used all over the world except some major parts of North America. The multi-user access scheme is a (somewhat weird, IMHO) mix of frequency and time multiplexing; there's no CDMA involved. It has been design with lots of competing providers and networks in mind, therefore it has great roaming capabilities. Furthermore, since most billing mechanisms (outside of North America, that is) involve NO AIRTIME CHARGES, and actually provide for cheaper in-network connections than those of stationary phones, GSM captured the market overnight. Most GSM-covered countries (including ones far less wealthy than US and Canada) sport coverage and penetration rates that still sound like science fiction over here (US/CAN). GSM also comes with cheap cross-provider messaging (called SMS) which is as popular as actual phonecalls especially among the poor population.There are pop-machines with phonenumbers attached to them, from which you can buy your daily dose of Canned Capitalism (COKE) by dialing the number -- the cost will be charged on your phonebill. This is just one example of things those "less developed" countries already have. Now, imagine what possibilites does a one-chip GSM phone open up in societies where almost everybody has a cellphone!

Why is it that whenever someone mentions European GSM/GPRS coverage, someone else must try and convince everyone else that the US has better land-line coverage?

Here is a quick hint for you: The US telephone network is at best directly comparable to 90% of the European Union member countries land line networks. The GSM/GPRS coverage is in addition to a perfectly fine land line network.

Stop trying to delude yourself. The US lags behind on telecoms infastructure.

Over here (UK) we pay by the minute, but SMS is rapidly becoming more popular than voice anyway (at 1p/message it's dirt cheap). The providers are busily trying to get everyone to buy colour phones with cameras so we can send pictures to each other - 'Be the first With a Nokia 7something' (Umm.. if I'm the first who am I supposed to send my pictures to?)

Thanks for the tip. I find it funny though that your comment was modded up, when it did not even bother to define what the acronym actually stands for. How would I know I encountered the "real GSM" that is being referred to in the article?

GSM would be enormously beneficial to the US. I have a GSM telephone which works practically anywhere in the world, except America. Why? Because the US thinks that the market should fight it out until one proprietary protocol wins over the others. Unfortunately this takes years and mass confusion, consumer uncertainty and overpricing reigns.

In the meantime, the rest of the world saw sense and adopted a single standard. The consequence is you can buy a phone in Thailand and use it in Ireland, you can fly from South Africa to India and still be in touch with head office.

The recalcitrance and obstinacy in the US to develop their own standard except through Gladiator-style death matches has left them isolated and way behind the rest of the world. At the end of the day it doesn't matter if the naysayers think CDMA or some variant was technically better than GSM because it still lost. Hopefully the US will learn better the next time around.

Yeah americans are just like linux users. Instead of using a technology like windows that the rest of the world is using, they have to go off and invent there own OS just to be recalcitrant and obstinant. Even it is technological superior wouldn't everyone be better off if we all used the same system?
More seriously GSM and CDMA are basically washes technology wise. Both have advantages and disadvantages ( but you will notice the 3g(not gprs) version of GSM is very similiar the CDMA technology. ) . The big issue as always is who gets the money. The royalties for GSM and CDMA are about hte same for a 3rd party company but someone like Nokia does much better with GSM since they have half the patents.
The big problem with the US wireless market is multiple carriers. Each carrier spends a ton of money in each big market duplicating each others effort. If they could have worked together (major handwaving) you could have 3x the capacity in the dense areas and in the low coverage area you could have covered 3 times the area for the same net expendure.

I'm European and found his post rather amusing: good reply, though you seem to have an anti-North American thing going on! I just can't stand bloody Bush leading Blair into a Blood agreement on the Oil wars.
You were wrong though in generalising about Europe: plenty of European countries have their media closely affiliated/controlled by political/economical forces. Check Italy, for one.